[Klug-general] Debian 4.0 released

[Mike Evans]

james snyder wrote:
> ndiswrapper 2.6.18 on xandros desktop 4 (a Debian based distro) recognizes pcmia wireless and instantly connects laptops to wireless networks without even requiring drivers, configuration or installs, where other distros have failed. why?
> 
> 
Ndiswrapper does of course require (Windows) drivers - it may just not 
require them of you because the distro contains a selection of the most 
common ones.  I presume that's how it works.  I installed Mandrake (when 
it was Mandrake) on my laptop some years ago and it did that too, 
although it was much happier with the windows drivers from my card's CD.

I added ndiswraper to Fedora Core 4 and it worked fine.  I thought I 
would have to do the same when I moved to core 6, but it came with a 
native driver for my card (a Lynksys card based on the Broadcom chipset) 
which it turned out worked fine.  In fact I am currently using it to 
communicate X over SSH to my desktop machine which is my email host and 
where I am running Thunderbird, and from there to the outside world. 
(Well the KLUG mailing list at least.)

I guess the answer to 'why?' is simply that certain things are more 
important to the developers of certain distros than others.  I once read 
a comment on a bulletin board that said "Please would someone buy 
laptops for all the impoverished Kernel hackers so that they focus more 
attention on getting hibernation and wireless to work". S/he had a point.

Mike